For months now, financially struggling Zynga has been suffering from a brain drain, losing numerous key company executives.

Now the social games developer is firing back at one of them, claiming Alan Patmore, former general manager of its "CityVille" game, walked off with some sensitive internal documents before joining rival Kixeye.

Zynga isn't going after Patmore's new company directly, but Kixeye happens to be the same social games company that uses an in-your-face recruiting video that alludes to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus as a foul-mouthed, impetuous young brat. (Kixeye features the video, which also pokes at other rival game makers, on its home page.)

In a civil suit filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court, Zynga claimed that Patmore uploaded more than 760 files containing internal data and other documents from his company laptop to his Dropbox online storage account just before resigning in August and moving to Kixeye.

The files included proprietary information about what made Zynga games successful, future company strategy and documents about more than 10 unreleased games, the suit said.

Patmore then attempted to delete Dropbox from the laptop, but "his efforts were unsuccessful and he left a forensic trail of his wrongful conduct," the suit said.

"Zynga respects the rights of its employees to resign and seek employment with other companies," the suit said. "But what Zynga cannot tolerate is the wholesale theft of some of its most sensitive and commercially valuable data."

Through a spokesman, Kixeye said Patmore was not available for comment about the suit. The company also issued this statement:

"Kixeye has nothing to do with the suit. Unfortunately, this appears to be Zynga's new employee retention strategy: Suing former employees to scare current employees into staying. They've clearly exhausted other options in their employee retention playbook."